As we aren't all in guilds full of top 50 material players, every single gearupgrade will bring you closer to a kill (provided that you have a working strategy). If you dont get these upgrades you are holding your guild back.

Spending all your time on dailies to get minimal upgrades will hold your guild back more than if you spent that time working on being a better player/using better strategies. It's all about priorities. If you have time to do everything, then that is great. But not everyone does. And telling people to blindly spend their time maxing out their gear is not good direction to give.

Gear is important. But if you spend more time on gear than you do on being a better player or working better strats - then you are prioritizing the wrong things.

Anything that increases character power, should be done by any raider that is worth a spot.
So yes item upgrades are mandatory for those who care, those who dont upgrade their gear are slacking, they might aswell not take a heroic item of the same slot as they have a normal item "as it is just a few ilvls higher". Upgrade= upgrade, hence why pve-ers got conq items at start as they were better then the 463 dungeon blues.
Sure ppl killed bosses in less gear then we have now, but there are different amounts of skill, and ppl have been playing together for various times, some are guildies for 1 week, others for 5 years, the later will know how the tank moves in a certain situation= dps gain for melee.

As we aren't all in guilds full of top 50 material players, every single gearupgrade will bring you closer to a kill (provided that you have a working strategy). If you dont get these upgrades you are holding your guild back.

Seriously? Normals raids are tuned to be done in ilv 463 gear from heroic 5 mans. Normal raids drop ilv 496. You need between 1.2 weeks and 2.2 weeks of capping valors to get 1 piece of ilv 483 or 496 gear. If that marginal upgrade is gonna make or break your "progress" now after 12 weeks (and that is progress in normals is uppose since we talk mandatory ilv 483 upgrades?) That is indeed not Top 50 material..it isn't even top 1000 material me thinks....

Yes, "Anything that increases character power, should be done by any raider that is worth a spot.". But is it always and only gear? Knowing your class, knowing strats inside out...THAT should make the difference, really.

The feature isn't necessarily going away, they just aren't going to allow it every tier. It's supposed to be sort of a "catch up" utility between new raid tiers. We got it in 5.1, which has no new raid, we will not have it in 5.2 which will, and probably we'll have it back in 5.3.

It sounds like they're still deciding if they like the concept and the way it works, so it isn't guaranteed the above will be the case but that is seems to be the general sort of plan. Probably if they don't bring it back, we'll see some kind of similar system instead.

Top guilds..true top guilds cleared all normals on the day they were out and all Hardmodes the week after. I think our definitions of a "Top guild" are rather different. The "best" 5 guilds on my server went pretty fast through normal modes and they are ranked between 1200 and 5500 worldwide. By no means "top" guilds. Yet by now they are half through all hardmodes.

Seriously? Normals raids are tuned to be done in ilv 463 gear from heroic 5 mans. Normal raids drop ilv 496. You need between 1.2 weeks and 2.2 weeks of capping valors to get 1 piece of ilv 483 or 496 gear. If that marginal upgrade is gonna make or break your "progress" now after 12 weeks (and that is progress in normals is uppose since we talk mandatory ilv 483 upgrades?) That is indeed not Top 50 material..it isn't even top 1000 material me thinks....

Yes, "Anything that increases character power, should be done by any raider that is worth a spot.". But is it always and only gear? Knowing your class, knowing strats inside out...THAT should make the difference, really.

Item upgrading works fine for heroic items, 6/6vaults 5/6hof 0/4toes 25hc atm, we had quite a few low% wipes on ambershaper hc before it finaly died. I am sorry to hear that you are still stuck on normals, but min-maxing isn't limited to those only, it helps everyone.

Top guilds..true top guilds cleared all normals on the day they were out and all Hardmodes the week after. I think our definitions of a "Top guild" are rather different. The "best" 5 guilds on my server went pretty fast through normal modes and they are ranked between 1200 and 5500 worldwide. By no means "top" guilds. Yet by now they are half through all hardmodes.

No rank 5500 guild killed it with only 463 gear, they surely had 476/483 LFR and 489 valor items.

Love how any feature that offers even a 0.0001% boost to someone's character power becomes "mandatory" and "necessary".
(...)
People arguing about "mandatory work we are forced to do to be better". It's a GAME. Have some FUN in it, and don't be all about the math and numbers. You'll realize how much more enjoyable it can be, when you don't try to consume every ounce of content immediately.

Originally Posted by Gahmuret

That's why you don't just brainlessly upgrade everything straight away. You need to think ahead. And THAT is what causes all this whining and hatred.

Originally Posted by Byniri

THANK YOU. I'm so sick of people bitching constantly about "WAAAH, I'M REQUIRED TO DO THIS, WAAAH" for the stupid item upgrades. Bunch of tryhards.
(...)
I swear if Blizzard added an item in the game that increased all your stats by 20, but to be able to get it you had to kill every boss in the current tier 5 times, and it cost 30k gold, people would bitch and whine about it being 'mandatory'.

Originally Posted by Byniri

You don't need extreme min/maxing in order to raid, and I'm sick of people who say this.

Originally Posted by Venant

Why do people continue to state that the game 'forces' you to do this?

Because they can't think further than their own nose? They are afraid and, before all, jealous that someone else might be able to polish his gear a little bit more than they can. And still too dumb to understand that the weekly point caps make sure that no one actually gains any advantage, not with epics anyway. Guess bads are afraid that someone doing lots of dungeons can upgrade a few more JP blues than themselves?

And then some less smart points:

Originally Posted by HardCoder

Requiring players to earn PvP gear is the dumb part.

Not going to even start about how retarded that comment is.

Originally Posted by Venant

I believe that the primary argument against having pvp upgrades (or at least upgrades to current season conq gear) is that the exceptional players that are able to gain very high ratings get far more conq points per week than other players, which means they effectively max out much sooner plus they have upgrades. These powered up characters can now make it more difficult for other players to break into higher brackets due to how the pvp system works. Basically, the upgrade system gives an even greater advantage to the elite pvp players.

Whining, whining. You know that there's still a weekly cap for Conquest Points? Good players just get capped quicker. Bad ones have the rest of the week to do so.

THANK YOU. I'm so sick of people bitching constantly about "WAAAH, I'M REQUIRED TO DO THIS, WAAAH" for the stupid item upgrades. Bunch of tryhards.

Min/maxing is NOT REQUIRED for raiding unless you're a top 100 competitive guild, and if you're in that you should be used to maxing out.

VP/JP upgrades are supposed to be a valor dump so that if you already have all the valor gear you need, you can still progress your character by upgrading the gear slightly.

The whole "it gives me power so I'm 100% required to do this" mentality is killing the game.

I swear if Blizzard added an item in the game that increased all your stats by 20, but to be able to get it you had to kill every boss in the current tier 5 times, and it cost 30k gold, people would bitch and whine about it being 'mandatory'.

edit: I completely agree with the complaints about upgrading pvp gear.

On the other hand, it's a game. Everyone plays it differently, and since it's an MMO, there's bound to be competition. Don't tell me how I should play it. Min-max-ing is one of the few things that still differentiates players.

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
To resist the influence of others, knowledge of oneself is most important.